So we’ve created a guide that will show you (or a friend or relative who’s just getting started): * How much you need to start investing. * The key steps for building long-term wealth. * Proven ways to find great companies to buy. Understanding these life-changing concepts will get any investor on the path to financial freedom. Built upon our 13 Steps to Investing Foolishly, The Motley Fool Guide to Investing for Beginners includes our top investors’ biggest mistakes, insights into different styles of investing, and much more. Plus, you get 3 great stock picks that we think could make a strong foundation to any portfolio.

    The book shifts focus from forces that drive markets to forces that drive successful trades. The robust performance of this approach has inspired the subtitle 'A Magic Sword of Necessity'. If you think of investing as a rigorous intellectual battle, you need to prepare for it thoroughly. Get in proper shape. Learn your moves, acquire your armor, your shield, your helmet and your battle horse. A magic weapon will be wasted if you get killed by the market's first arrow. Every chapter in this book represents a step towards mastering the sword of necessity. Taking each of those steps has its own merit. Both aspiring and experienced investors can find value in this book long before the advanced concepts, such as "necessity" and "dominance," are fully introduced. And with complete training and equipment, this weapon may give you a devastating advantage.

    In the beginning was Josh Levine, an idealistic programming genius who dreamed of wresting control of the market from the big exchanges that, again and again, gave the giant institutions an advantage over the little guy. Levine created a computerized trading hub named Island where small traders swapped stocks, and over time his invention morphed into a global electronic stock market that sent trillions in capital through a vast jungle of fiber-optic cables. By then, the market that Levine had sought to fix had turned upside down, birthing secretive exchanges called dark pools and a new species of trading machines that could think, and that seemed, ominously, to be slipping the control of their human masters. Dark Pools is the fascinating story of how global markets have been hijacked by trading robots--many so self-directed that humans can't predict what they'll do next.

    Far from being a sensational reading of the runes, this book delves deep into the past, to chart how old investor trends developed and assess how new patterns might emerge. Change is the thread. As Faber points out, the world is experiencing a transformation as great as Europe s late-15th Century golden age of discovery and the Industrial Revolution of the19th Century events that altered the commercial face of the Earth forever.And from this dramatic landscape a world in which economic, social and political conditions are morphing at an alarming rate Faber identifies investment opportunities.Asia s three-billion-strong population will have a profound effect on the world, writes Faber, cautioning that today s richest cities and clusters of wealth are unlikely to retain their exalted positions in the future.